Never Admit Govt Helps – Anybody

One of the easiest adjustments to make as we re-work our psyches to fit the pre- and misconceptions of the New American Oligarchy is the one where we have to re-write history. This has become such a common tactic of the corporate media that it almost goes without saying but it can still come as a surprise when you’re not expecting it.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his party maintain that Washington policy plays a limited role in entrepreneurial success, and is often more of a hindrance than a help.

In pushing that theme this week, though, some of the speakers have left out part of the story.

In a convention floor speech Tuesday night, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin boasted that people rushed into her state in the Great Land Run of 1889 with only their own grit to thank, and no help from the federal government.

“And in 1897, eight years after the land run, a handful of adventurous pioneers risked their own money – not the federal government’s money – to drill Oklahoma’s first oil well, the Nellie Johnstone,” she told conventioneers.

However, Fallin’s characterization omitted major chunks of federal government involvement, including the Dawes Act of 1887 and other measures that forced Indian tribes onto reservations, freeing “open” surplus lands for white settlers. Oil later was found on some of that land. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided the method by which the land was distributed to settlers.

This is known as “history by omission”: not actually a lie, all you need do is leave out the part of the truth you’d rather people didn’t know.

The Crackpot Consensus

One of the most challenging aspects of adjusting to the NAO’s is the fact that so many of them are, well, stupid. Todd Akin’s absurd belief that women have some sort of magical control over their bodies if only they’d decide to use it is just the tip of a very large, annoying, and dangerous iceberg. The Times’ Timothy Egan gives a chapter and verse or two that barely scratch the surface but make the point quite clearly: many of the most powerful people in the country, all of them major puppets of the oligarchs, have demonstrated again and again that they have great faith but zero actual knowledge.

Did You Know…?

1) Did you know that Newtie would never have committed adultery if he wasn’t such a damned passionate patriot?

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is in the early stages of a presidential campaign, spoke in an interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network about his history of adultery and divorces. And as Gingrich told it, he sought God’s forgiveness – and as for the events themselves, they were driven by how hard he was working and his great passion for America.

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” said Gingrich.

Oh.

2) Did you know that an NPR exec was just fired for calling racist Tea Partiers racist?

So James O’Keefe has another scalp.

Apparently, Glenn Beck can call the president of the United States a racist on national television and keep his job, but if you’re an NPR executive who says the same thing privately about a bunch of nameless Teabaggers — you’ve gotta go.

And the real kicker is, what Ron Schiller said is 100% true.

Such is the state of our “news media”. Beck can get away with calling Obama a racist precisely because it isn’t true. Schiller had to be fired precisely because his accusations were accurate – the Tea Party is indeed racist and has proved it on a number of occasions.

Is there any room left in New Zealand?

3) Did you know that even Glenn Beck’s audience is tired of him?

 Since last August, when he summoned more than 100,000 followers to the Washington mall for the “Restoring Honor” rally, Mr. Beck has lost over a third of his audience on Fox — a greater percentage drop than other hosts at Fox. True, he fell from the great heights of the health care debate in January 2010, but there has been worrisome erosion — more than one million viewers — especially in the younger demographic.

(emphasis added)

Hate and paranoia sell, I guess, but only temporarily. Car wrecks are fascinating, too, but eventually one moves on. You know?

Scary Facts

1. This woman is not only a lawyer – inconceivable enough, you’d think. What’s really scary is that a University pays her to teach her brand of law to other people. (Via TBogg)

When people who have no respect for law are teaching law, you know you’re fucked.

2. A certifiable psychopath with homicidal paranoid delusions has a national tv show. (Via Norwegianity)

And yes, he’s stupid, too.

The Myth of Christmas

Reprinted from 12.24.06 – And it will continue to be printed every year until the O’Reilly-originated “War on Christmas” BS ends. There’s no antidote to lies except truth.

This would be the time, if ever there was one, to reflect on the meaning of Christmas, but before we can do that to any purpose we need to clear away some of the dead wood by exploding a couple of the myths that have built up around it since the holiday became popular in the late 19th century. Chief among these is the legend that Christmas is Christian, or even religious.

Myth #1: That Christmas used to be a religious holiday but has been turned into a consumer carnival

It may seem obvious that Christmas is a Christian holiday. The very name of the day suggests a celebration of Christ, and certainly many have bemoaned the fact that Xmas seems to have lost its religious meaning under a barrage of commercialism. Back in the 1950′s the satirist Stan Freberg released a classic record called “$Green Christmas$” which savagely criticized what Christmas had become even then; its chief sound effect was the ringing of a cash register. Behind all the criticism was then – and is now – a belief that Christmas had once meant something it no longer means, that what was originally the celebration of a religious figure has been twisted into a callous, materialist frenzy of buying stuff.

The truth is somewhat different.

In America, we are reminded, the idea of a Christmas celebration didn’t really take hold until commercial interests recognized its potential and began to sell it like corn flakes.

The growth of Santa as the predominant icon of Christmas in much of the world grew out of the efforts of retail wizards such as John Wanamaker and Rowland Hussey Macy, founders of the modern department store. Much like the early church fathers, Wanamaker and Macy systematically laid claim to a Christmas of their own making in the 19th century.By this point, said Russell W. Belk, a sociologist and anthropologist at York University in Toronto, Christmas had already been through several incarnations — Christians in the United States had initially resisted Christmas because it was seen as tied to the Catholic calendar, but waves of European immigrants brought traditions of Christmas celebrations with them. Still, the idea of giving gifts to relatives was not the norm, especially among English immigrants, where Christmas gifts were primarily seen as acts of benevolence toward servants and slaves.

***

Business magnates who had once protested that holidays such as Christmas were a drain on the economy spotted the business potential of Christmas and encouraged the idea of gift-giving among family. Where Christmas gifts had once been primarily about charity, advertisers and marketers encouraged the notion that Christmas was primarily a family celebration and stressed the importance of reciprocal gift exchanges for friends and relatives. By the 20th century, American marketing geniuses led by Coca-Cola had seized on the advertising potential of Santa Claus. Although Santa’s ancestors in Europe and Asia had various religious connotations, the modern Santa is an American invention, with growing appeal in Europe and around the world.

“Coca-Cola to some extent owns Christmas,” said Belk. In the 1930s, he added, “they had a painter commissioned to do one painting of Santa Claus every year . . . it seems likely that the red color of Santa’s outfits came from Coca-Cola’s paintings.”

It doesn’t actually. “Santa Claus” is from the Dutch for Saint Nicholas – Sinterklaas – and the color red was always associated with the Greek St Nicholas who is the source of the icon. (More about him later.) Coke’s artists merely appropriated an image already made famous by Thomas Nast in the 1870′s and 80′s, an action that is fairly symbolic of how the holiday actually developed.

Myth #2: That Christmas is primarily a Christian holiday

The trappings of Christmas are almost entirely pagan in origin. Christmas trees, the lights on both trees and homes, wreaths, caroling, Santa Claus, the exchange of gifts – all of it was born in pagan solstice festivals beginning, as far as we can tell, long before Christ’s time. In the context of the solstice, it all makes perfect sense. In a Christian context, they simply don’t belong. What does Christ, a product of the Judean desert, have to do with pine trees, after all? Nothing.

• Christmas trees – Probably born in Germany or the Nordic countries, the ritual symbolism of the solstice evergreen was just that: it was ever green. Unlike the deciduous trees that dominated the forests of northern Europe whose leaves died and fell away as winter began, fir trees remained green all year round. They were the perfect representation in pagan societies for the persistence of life and the fertility of the earth on which those societies depended. Druids (the real ones, not the pale, bogus artifices we know today) worshipped trees, evergreens in particular, because they believed they were the earthly incarnations of spirits and/or gods. Evergreens were believed either to be or to be the homes of spirits who controlled the sun and had the power to bring it back and renew the earth for another year. The custom of bringing a tree inside, almost certainly German, probably began as a form of pagan tree-worship.
• Lights – As the days shortened and the sun threatened to disappear, the long nights became a source of real fear, not just because folk believed it might vanish but because they believed that evil spirits lurked in the dark, and the longer the nights were, the more chance there was that these monsters would wreak havoc on their villages. The solution, of course, was a Festival of Light held, naturally, on the one day of the year that had the least of it. There were torch parades and candles were kept burning all night. When the trees came inside, so did the candles, and by the Victorian era the candles had become attached to the branches of the tree.
• Wreaths – Common to many cultures, wreaths were either worn, as in Rome, or displayed as signs of either special favor or protection from evil. Long before trees were brought into the house, wreaths were attached to doorposts, connecting the magic of the evergreen to individual homes.
• Caroling – Noise has long been believed by many peoples to scare away evil spirits. In China they beat drums and gongs, in Europe they sang. The origin of this particular custom (called “wassailing” in Britain) is lost to history but it isn’t unreasonable to assume that it was a natural addition to all the other anti-evil charms employed by our ancestors. So is dancing, of course, so it isn’t surprising that the two were combined. In fact, the original meaning of the word was “circle dance” and was most likely an integral part of the midwinter ritual. We don’t do the dancing part much any more, and it’s too bad.
• Santa Claus – Unlike the rest of our Christmas traditions, Santa Claus does have some slight connection to Christianity. Born to wealthy and devout Christian parents in Patara, then a province of Greece, St Nicholas is supposed to have taken the words of Christ to heart and given away the whole of his large inheritance to relieve the suffering of the poor and the sick. Though he was never ordained, his reputation for piety was such that he was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. Persecuted and imprisoned by the Emperor Diocletian, he returned to Myra after his release and died there on December 6, 343. For many years after that, the anniversary of his death was celebrated as “St Nicholas Day”.Co-incidence? Sort of. The fact that he died in December only a few days before Saturnalia (the Roman midwinter festival) connected him quite naturally to what became Christmas when the Catholic Church appropriated midwinter festivals for a celebration of the birth of Christ. After centuries of trying unsuccessfully to stamp out these primarily pagan rituals, the geniuses in the Church came up with a brilliant idea: if they couldn’t be stopped, they could certainly be swallowed up – assimilated by the Church and given a Catholic context. This was to prove a valuable and almost universally successful tactic in the centuries to come.St Nicholas Day melded rather naturally into the solstice festivals and it wasn’t long before St Nick and Christmas were inseparable. In many parts of Europe, Dec 6 is still celebrated as both.It should be noted that the St Nick we know is neither Greek nor terribly Christian. He’s Dutch. Sort of….
• The giving of gifts, stockings over the fireplace, and coming down the chimney– Both of these customs arose not in Europe but – are you ready for this? – here. In America. In New York, in fact.
  

  After the American Revolution, New Yorkers remembered with pride the colony’s nearly-forgotten Dutch roots. John Pintard, influential patriot and antiquarian, who founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, promoted St. Nicholas as patron saint of both society and city. In January 1809, Washington Irving joined the society and on St. Nicholas Day that year he published the satirical fiction, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, with numerous references to a jolly St. Nicholas character. This was not a saintly bishop, rather an elfin Dutch burgher with a clay pipe. These delightful flights of imagination are the origin of the New Amsterdam St. Nicholas legends: that the first Dutch emigrant ship had a figurehead of St. Nicholas; that St. Nicholas Day was observed in the colony; that the first church was dedicated to him; and that St. Nicholas comes down chimneys to bring gifts. Irving’s work was regarded as the “first notable work of imagination in the New World.”The New York Historical Society held its first St. Nicholas anniversary dinner on December 6, 1810. John Pintard commissioned artist Alexander Anderson to create the first American image of Nicholas for the occasion. Nicholas was shown in a gift-giving role with children’s treats in stockings hanging at a fireplace. The accompanying poem ends, “Saint Nicholas, my dear good friend! To serve you ever was my end, If you will, now, me something give, I’ll serve you ever while I live.”

  So Washington Irving invented the Santa Claus we know more or less out of whole cloth, relying on legends (as he often did) and embellishing until the original story was barely recognizable. Irving entirely ignored the religious connotation of the title “saint” and any overt connection to religion, let alone to Christ. His St Nick was already 95% secular, a cultural symbol closer to solstice celebrations than Christian ones.
  
  The total secularization of St Nicholas, morphing him into the Santa Claus we know, was accomplished by only two men: Clement Moore (probably) and Thomas Nast. Moore is generally credited with writing A Visit from St Nicholas(“‘Twas the night before Christmas/and all through the house….” – you know it) for his children in 1822. It forever identified St Nick with the roly-poly, “jolly old elf” of Irving’s story and pretty much divorced him from any possible religious significance. Fifty years later, what Moore had done with words, Nast did with pictures. His cartoons of Santa Claus formed our visual image of the old guy once and for all. Following Irving and Moore, Nast’s Santa is no more a religious figure than, say, Uncle Sam.

Of all the traditions we associate with Christmas, only three are overtly religious: the Nativity Scene, the angel on top of the tree, and going to church. Many Christian churches have the former and most Christians do the latter on Christmas even if they never go the rest of the year. By my count, that makes Christmas roughly 87% secular whether Bill O’Reilly likes it or not.

 

RW Blogger Admits He Hearts Witchcraft

In the world of Right-wingnuttery, it is considered important to espouse only fundamentalist religious views: gays are evil, abortion is evil, Obama is the Antichrist, and Halloween is a symphony for the devil in which demons hide in candy and take over kid’s souls, turning them into Satan’s Little Helpers, ie witches.

But there’s Christine O’Donnell bragging about once being a witch and having picnics on a satanic altar, so here comes Glenn Reynolds, A-1, top o’ the heap RW blogger, bigger than Powerline and Mad Michelle combined, to tell us – and all his soon-to-be-ex-fundamentalist friends, I suspect – that witchcraft ain’t so bad. I mean, whatever evil lurks in those covens, being “a witch is better than [being] a Marxist. Which is undoubtedly true.” (Via Ray Edroso)

Apparently, backing up an embarrassingly incompetent and hopelessly insane TeaBag whacko is more important in the the RW World than any sort of religious belief one might hold. One wonders what the Values crowd is going to think about Glenn’s wholesale embrace of black magic.

The Last Word on O’Reilly

From James Walcott:

It is a persistent burr under Bill’s Hopalong Cassidy saddle that he’s never received the honors and awards and esteem accorded a Bill Moyers or the late Walter Cronkite or even a Dan Rather, and you know what, Bill? You never will, because you’re annoying, you’re a grandstanding belligerent, and nobody likes you.

Not even your mother.

Pubs Cave On Financial Filibuster

Who could have predicted this?

Republican senators have agreed to stop filibustering debate on financial-regulatory reform legislation. After successfully blocking the bill for the third time in three days Wednesday, Republicans appeared ready to go another round. But when Majority Leader Harry Reid threatened to throw a Senate sleepover by calling votes all night, the GOP backed down.

Practically everybody. And we did.

Remember when we were begging Harry to force the GOP to defend its insane, incoherent policies physically? On live teevee in front of the whole country? We said that all those fake filibusters would either a) collapse or b) make the voters realize just what shitheads the GOoPers are.

Harry said No. Remember? He woulodn’t do it. It wouldn’t work.

Guess who was right and who was wrong. Again.

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Quick! Call Ken Starr!

Lee Judge, Kansas City Star

Separated At Birth?

You wouldn’t think Iranian President Ahmadinejad and batshit-crazy wingnut blogger Pam “Atlas Juggs” Geller would have anything in common, would you? She hates his guts and he thinks she’s a lunatic. She wants him assassinated and he wants her eviscerated. But you’d be wrong. They’re both Holocaust Deniers. Which is weird because Geller is, like, Jewish.

You know, there is a sort of resemblabce here. They both look like they’ve been injecting way too much botox, Pammy in her forehead and Prez A in his nose. Co-incidence?

And oh yeah, as long as we’re discussing La Juggs, she thinks passing the healthcare “reform” bill on Xmas Eve is blasphemy!!!! (You have to imagine a deep bass voice through an echo chamber on that last word.) I might agree. I tend to suspect that Christ would NEVER want his name associated with a bill that shamelessly molests innocent people. (Via Norwegianity)

The Myth of Christmas

Reprinted from 12.24.06 – And it will continue to be printed every year until the O’Reilly-originated “War on Christmas” BS ends. There’s no antidote to lies except truth.

This would be the time, if ever there was one, to reflect on the meaning of Christmas, but before we can do that to any purpose we need to clear away some of the dead wood by exploding a couple of the myths that have built up around it since the holiday became popular in the late 19th century. Chief among these is the legend that Christmas is Christian, or even religious.

Myth #1: That Christmas used to be a religious holiday but has been turned into a consumer carnival

It may seem obvious that Christmas is a Christian holiday. The very name of the day suggests a celebration of Christ, and certainly many have bemoaned the fact that Xmas seems to have lost its religious meaning under a barrage of commercialism. Back in the 1950′s the satirist Stan Freberg released a classic record called “$Green Christmas$” which savagely criticized what Christmas had become even then; its chief sound effect was the ringing of a cash register. Behind all the criticism was then – and is now – a belief that Christmas had once meant something it no longer means, that what was originally the celebration of a religious figure has been twisted into a callous, materialist frenzy of buying stuff.

The truth is somewhat different.

Stoopid Is Gud!

Tom Tomorrow on Our Most Precious Resource (click to enlarge)

There Oughta Be a Law

OK so we can’t agree on which Democrat healthcare reform bill will best preserve insurance company profits, at least we can all agree that there oughta be a law that David Brooks not be allowed to masquerade as a psychologist, historian, economist, or – Dawg forbid – a philosopher. Can’t we? Please?

And no matter which h r b will best p i c p, any bill that passes ought to require that “crazy fatigue” is fully covered, even if 2/3 of the country needs treatment.

***

Seems to me that of all the contests to cheat on, the Miss America contest ought to be the one most cheat-free. I mean, if the contest organizers are going to pay for contestants’ boob jobs, where will it end? Is nothing real any more? This has to be a violation of the truth-in-advertising law, doesn’t it?

***

The black community ought to consider passing a law against Star Parker. She’s giving them all a black eye. So to speak.

Sharpton blocked Limbaugh like Governor Orval Faubus tried to block black children from entering Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.

Can’t say it any better than TBogg.

Yes. Keeping Rush Limbaugh from joining a bunch of rich white men attempting to buy their way into a fairly exclusive club made up of other rich white men is just like calling out the National Guard to keep black children from going to school with white children.

Awesome analogy.

Against Minority Rule

Back in the bad old days of apartheid in South Africa, the pitch against the policy was less often racism than the scandal of a tiny minority ruling a big majority. It seemed – and was called – a travesty of democracy, the antithesis of representative government, a sort of racist tyranny/slash/oligarchy. The core of democratic governing was embodied in the concept that the majority rules. If it doesn’t, explained John Locke in Of Civil Government, you’ve got chaos.

For if the consent of the majority shall not in reason be received as the act of the whole and conclude every individual, nothing but the consent of every individual can make anything to be the act of the whole which…’tis next to impossible ever to be had.

For over 200 years the United States and every other country with a democratic constitution considered this rule unbreakable. Abraham Lincoln fought the only internal war we’ve ever had to prevent a minority of Southern slaveowners from dictating policy to the majority government at the point of a bayonet. Political parties from the Federalists to the Whigs to the Know-Nothings to today’s GOP, Democrat, and Green parties understood the rules: when a majority of the country has decided on a course, the minority has to change their minds to get its way. In a democracy, minorities may influence policy but they don’t make it.

No one, to my knowledge, ever questioned this fundamental truth. Until the Bush Cult.

Another Moran Moment

Cartoonists and sane people have long noted the cognitive dissonance here but I found it refreshing to see it in their own words. And their own handwriting.

Um. Riiiight.